Theatre Arts • Methodist Church Hall • Cnr Milton Road and Wesley Street • Observatory • 7925 • Cape Town

Vrêk –performance at the edge of humanity as art

Posthuman Performance
Tossie VAN TONDER aka Nobonke, Nico ATHENE

Vrêk 5 is addressing performance as medicine. Can an audience be moved to receiving the medicine of performance? 

We often think of being healed as taking, receiving something. But how much receiving lies in letting go, an active surrender of doing, allowing the labour of another for medicine to reach us in new and unexpected ways? This act, the willingness to be given, can be equated with a willingness to die. Can we die relationally, ecologically become fluid in difference from how we are? If we claim to heal land, may we place the last puzzle piece that is our body on that landscape?  Can we allow the performance to stay with us as medicine, be still, rather than analysing it for its theatrical skills? Can we allow ourselves to be moved, healed by another’s movement or sound? These are directional, volitional as much as permeable and mysterious. We locate ourselves in the scene, on the dance floor, with the body or bodies of another and non-human, even nonmaterial beings as acts of medicine. How does one perform that as improvisation of movement, music, lights?

Vrêk 5 takes this task on for this Sunday 7pm, the last of the Vrêk series. 

About Vrêk

The story of the world is too vast, strange, and fluid to assume positions of fixed identity, or bathe ourselves in distractions that promise certainty or the myth of control. Already that control is interrupted by pandemia, climate change, loss of bio-diversity and the realisation that the world long stopped making sense to humanity. Vrêk is ongoing initiation, or ritual theatre, to unveil what we are dying and living for with each passing moment.


Vrêk is a South African term that opens, yet intensifies all possibilities of initiated dying: big, small, romantic, irreverent, relational or with fantasies of ending, or dreams of transcendence. On the performance floor Vrêk speculates with powers of a surrender to a dynamic death, the possibility of being creative within the visceral entanglements of a general ecology. To stay with the trouble of it all.

At 66, Tossie van Tonder aka Nobonke is a veteran dance artist. Ageing brought her the gifts of authenticity and sober notions of being an artist. As mentor and ontological coach she supports people in offering their gifts in a complex world. She is a student of the post-human epoch where she researches the human bodymind beyond human boundaries. As such she teaches live and online. Nobonke belongs to the Majoli clan and is the writer of My African Heart.
Nico Athene is a body of colliding personas - a multidisciplinary artist, birth doula in training, filmmaker, anthropomorph, landscape ecology, river, bee, hummm. Athene is currently completing her MAFA at the University of Witwatersrand, where she is exploring identity beyond the tradable, and the opportunities for relationship in ‘capitalist wastelands.’ She has exhibited with various galleries and contexts. Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician. He spent 17 years as a teacher at Zonnebloem Children’s Art Centre in District Six. In the mid-90s he was one of the founding artists of the Greatmore Artists Studios in Woodstock as well as the Cape chapter of Thupelo Workshop. In the 80s during a period of personal awakening and indigenous consciousness he developed an interest in music and sound-related activities that included the creation of self-made instruments. He was a founding member of the performance group Khoi Khonnexion and his musical expression is grounded in the philosophy of free improvisation. He has forged long-term performance partnerships with dancer / choreographer Jacki Job and with poets Malika Ndlovu and Khadija Heeger and is a prominent figure in the local free jazz community. Sumalgy Nuro is a Mozambican Maputo-based urban musician and dancer with a strong background in traditional African arts who has embraced contemporary music and dance through music-dance studies at MoNo Pedagogical University (Maputo, 2013-2014) Kulturskolen Frederikstadt  (Norway, 2014) and postgraduate studies at the University of Cape Town (South Africa, 2019 – 2021).  His interest is in the integration of music and dance in multi-media works in which real time music and dance composition forms the basis for a practice in which visual and audio elements are seen as part of a continuum rather than kept in separate boxes. His first love, African traditional music and dance, is the prism for these varied explorations inspired by the old, but aspiring for the new.